Judaism
Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people. It is an ancient, monotheistic, Abrahamic religion with the Torah as its foundational text. It encompasses the religion, philosophy, and culture of the Jewish people. Judaism is considered by religious Jews to be the expression of the covenant that God established with the Children of Israel. Judaism encompasses a wide corpus of texts, practices, theological positions, and forms of organization. The Torah is part of the larger text known as the Tanakh or the Hebrew Bible, and supplemental oral tradition represented by later texts such as the Midrash and the Talmud. With between 14.5 and 17.4 million adherents worldwide, Judaism is the tenth largest religion in the world. Overview Many thousands of years ago a war was fought between the Powers---known to legend as the Titans---and the servants of the Old Ones, who sought to reduce the physical world to formless chaos. The battle is remembered in Greek Legends as the rise of Kronos and his brethren, who put down the monstrous legions of Uranus in order to create a Golden Age of order, peace and plenty. Unfortunately as he got on in years the role of Supreme Titan weighed heavily on the mind of the old boy, and Kronos began to act...strange and unnatural, even going so far as to eat his own children in order to prevent one from rising up to supplant him. This naturally upset his wife, the Titaness known as Rhea, who spared several of her offspring by hiding them on Earth in various guises, then arming the leader of the group, a young Zeus, who instituted many military innovations such as massed formations of infantry and cavalry, and hundred-arm slingers, a human army that served his beck and call when he stormed the palace of his father and overthrew his despotic reign...about 1750 BC by the reckoning of modern-day scholars. About the same time as this was happening a young man by the name of Yussef was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, only to rise to prominence in the Egyptian court, which at the time was under Hyksos domination. The Hebrews of that time prospered through the harsh droughts and periodic famines of the day, only to fall out of favor when the Hyksos dynasty was overthrown by a resurgent pro-Egyptian movement. At the same time that this occurred a more mature Zeus was facing down problems of his own in the form of a palace rebellion, headed by his sister-wife and several of his more unscrupulous offspring, the leader of whom was a promising and ambitious young fellow by the name of Lucifer, whose name in Greek is 'Light Bearer.' Zeus was not as unscrupulous about dispatching his own offspring as was his own father, but Lucifer was a troubling young god full of spite and mischief and utterly not to be trusted. So he created a special box to hold the spirit of his son bound in place for all eternity...a box made of Cedar wood with special ornaments and charms that later on gained the name of an Ark, which he then had buried at the edges of the known world, which at the time just happened to be the outskirts of the Egyptian desert. Two centuries later, around the year 1398 BC, a young man on summer sabbatical from the palace was presented a curiosity that some nomads found in a cave, and---being raised on the belief that he was himself divine and had little to fear from the various foreign inscriptions saying, 'Keep Out' and 'Do Not Touch'---he made the mistake of opening the box and immediately encountered Lucifer, who wasted no time converting the boy to his way of thinking. Thus did Pharaoh Amonhotep IV become the infamous Monotheist who attempted systematically to destroy the Egyptian religion and replace it with Sun worship. Calling his God Aton, he instituted a series of so-called reforms whose cumulative result was to upset the entire worldly order of his Empire. His rule was characterized by much suffering and heavy taxation of his people, and resulted in his reign ending prematurely when the Priests of the Old Amon religion took certain steps to reinstitute the reign of their old order. They gathered up all things that was of Akhnaton's doing and dismissed them to the furthest reaches of the Arabian desert, including the box which Lucifer was once again imprisoned. The Priests recognized the Ark for the terrible thing that it represented and sealed it away in a cave near to the land of Adon, where modern-day Yemen be located. At the same time they banished from court all adherents to the cult of Aton, which numbered among them a Semetic prince by the name of Ramoses...known to thee by the name of Moses. Moses lived among the tribe of the Midianites playing down his Egyptian identity until the day he crossed the path where Lucifer was buried. Being a frustrated and ambitious soul at heart it was easy to appeal to his frustrated yearnings in order to make him Lucifer's errand boy, who could gain to the Exile's cause the one thing he lacked...a following of loyal devotees. Lucifer had learned the error of his previous approach of top-down rule and was now prepared to institute a ground-upward campaign of gradual conversion. Moses returned to Egypt and tried to rekindle interest in the old followers of the Aton religion but was rebuffed by the new Pharaoh, who had every cause to dread the cult's resurgence. Lucifer granted to Moses some conjurer's powers but they did not impress the magically adept of the priesthood...right up until a Cholera epidemic broke out with the Nile being infected with Red Tide, which to many minds seemed like an omen of ill favor from above. Many flocked to Moses for answers and amongst the Semitic tribes he found a partialfollowing, enough to pose a more credible challenge to the existing order. The Pharaoh at last banished the interloper and all who followed him from Egyptian territories. The actual Exodus numbered a little more than a couple of thousand people in all, mostly merchants, peasants and mercenaries who shared clan ties to the Semetic tribes of the eastern Arabian desert nomads. For the most part the Egyptians were happy to see them leave, right up until Moses stopped by a temple of the Goddess Hathor to acquire some "funds" that he would need in his travels, which prompted Pharaoh to send an army against him, an army that got bogged down in a swamp when Moses led his merry band of bandit raiders across a marshy wilderness on their way to the coastline. They arrived at Adon and camped at the base of the mountain where Lucifer was established, but when rebellions broke out Moses was swift to put it down by bloody means and ruthless methods, then instituted the harsh imposition of a military-style rule of Law over his followers, gradually converting them from a rag-tag band into a hardly and disciplined bandit army that gradually swept northward and arrived at the province later known as Judea. For the New Order that Moses brought to the nomadic tribes of goatherds and shepherds was a militant band of apocalyptic fanatics who swept through the Hibiru ranks, converting and assimilating them into a tight-knit 'Chosen' people who would gladly do Lucifer's bidding. From there they were quick to make their presence known by raiding caravan trails and plundering villages wherever they roamed, taking all that they needed and slaughtering everyone who gave them even a token of resistance. They lacked the sophistication to lay siege to defended forts and cities...but when an earthquake shattered the walls of a key trade post known as Yeriko they were swift to take advantage and further their territorial claims...right up until they ran into a group far tougher and nastier than themselves, the Philistine Kingdoms of the coastline. And therein hangs a tail that lasted for the next few hundred years. An impasse between the civilized Philistines and the uncouth barbarians who called themselves the 'Children of Yahweh. Around about this time they encountered yet another threat to their dominion when another son of Zeus happened upon their lands and challenged the supremacy of Lucifer...the man-god known as the Hercules of Legends. It was Lucifer who provoked the fight...at first seeking to gain an ally who might share his desire to see a change in the power structure of Olympus, but when that plan failed Lucifer turned to his fall-back plans, recruiting his own Heroic warrior in the form of his son by a mortal woman...a man of the tribe of Dan, the Sampson of legend. Eventually he perished after having brought low the major Temple site of the Philistine religion, thus paving the way for Lucifer to eventually supplant and overturn a major rivalry with the Baal gods of the coastline, though the actual fall didn’t occur until much later when a young man by the name of David challenged the reign of the first King appointed by the Hibaru tribes, Saul of Yudah, who at the time had no capitol but the tent he carried with him, and who lacked the charismatic following of the young Philistine-backed upstart. David made a point to capture a fortified cistern located in the middle of a nearly uninhabited valley nestled close to the Jordan river, and by turns made this remote site the capitol for his burgeoning Kingdom, a place to hide his forces away from the caravan routes and various enemies who might challenge his military genius. It would take two hundred years more---plus a radical change in the climate---before the place had grown to become the city known today as Jerusalem, but it was the perfect spot for Lucifer to use as a launching point for his Grand Designs, which was nothing less than to conquer and rule the entire Arabian peninsula. Under David's son, Solomon, he cultivated a bright young man of great ability who could indeed fulfill the dark ambitions of his patron. But then something went very wrong with the plan...the Pharoah of Egypt invaded the realm and made off with a substantial booty, reducing Solomon to poverty and stripping away his divine ally, leaving him only with ashes. Lucifer was once again imprisoned within his box-shaped containment, and so has remained in exile down to the present era, plotting his dark return and vowing his vengeance against the mortals whom he believes betrayed him. But still he did have a following in the desert reaches among the wilder tribes who harbored many a fanatic. Who plotted time and again to overturn the government and allow Lucifer to return to a state of glory. These fanatics caused much of the agitation and distress you read about in the Bible, and several times they came close to achieving total victory, but always to be frustrated at the last by the perverse resiliency of mortals, who have often refused to grovel in slavery at the feet of a spiritual tyrant. The tribes separated into two Kingdoms, with each rival camp creating nasty stories that vilified the other with Roaboam---the son of Solomon---on the one side, and Jeraboam the Usurper on the other. Which is the whole reason the first written testaments of the so-called Pentateuch got inscribed in the first place. A two-century long schism that only came to a climax when the Assyrian Empire moved in and took over. Making Israel into a client state of their domain, so that tribute was never more paid to Memphis but rather to Damascus. But in between those chapters was the incident in which the minions of Lucifer overthrew the Northern Kingdom during the reign of King Ahab, who was replaced by a Luciferite by the name of Jeru, who attempted to build a rival cult to the one centered in Jerusalem, which still at the time was hardly bigger than a fishing village, even though that's where they created the first temple. Lucifer instructed the building of his Temple to make it a center-point of occult power, and Solomon was his ideal puppet sorceror king who implemented many institutional practices meant to build up Lucifer's potency so that he might pose a genuine threat to the Celestial order. Unfortunately for their plans the priests of Egypt were wiser than expected and headed off this threat to the peace of the region. They captured the so-called 'Ark of the Covenant' and buried it deep within a protected vault in one of their priestly temples. They had thought this would contain the evil deity within, but Lucifer caused the city itself to be buried beneath a sandstorm, and there he would remain until an intrepid adventurer briefly unearthed him. Trapped and divided from the temple that was meant to be the focal point of his glory, Lucifer cast out his tendrils to touch any mind that might be receptive to his message, and in the impious scoundrel known as Elijah the Tishibite he found a ready vessel for his evil intentions. Elijah---and his demonic successor-clone, Elisha---sought to vilify an innocent woman by the name of Yezabel, whose only real crime was to be a foreign princess of a Pheonician royal house with family connections to the Assyrians, who brought with her foreign ways and a religious order that seriously threatened the Lucifer movement. Fomenting a rebellion that would forever mark her name with a taint of evil the Yahweh-inspired movement overthrew the legitimate sovereign of that time and replaced him with a far more odious tyrant. Of course the upstart Jeru was all too quick to change his tune when Yezabel's kinfolk came down from the north to avenge her unseemly murder. And then there was that rather interesting fellow named Hezekiah, who came along a little more than half a century later, as well as Josiah, his grandson. King Hezekiah of the line of David presided at the time when Jerusalem at long last bloomed from an outpost to a legitimate capitol city, when a scribe named Hilkiah came before him presenting some 'documents' upon which the ink was still drying purporting to outline the master plan of Yahweh for his children...the priestly texts known as Leviticus and Numbers. He never questioned their authenticity. He simply rent his garments in a far-too-public display of religious fervor then set about to initiate these so-called reforms, culminating in his ill-conceived attempt to destroy the Norther Israeli 'High Places' that had become a nuisance and a threat to the authority of the Temple in Jerusalem. Of course in doing so he mightily displeased his northern patron, and the King of Assyria punished the Hebrew lands severely in a campaign of wanton slaughter. Only by making amends and offering the treasures of his Temple in tribute did Hezekiah assuage the rapine of his earthly lord and master...but in doing so he offended both the Temple and its own dark liege lord, and that set in motion the destruction of the land of the Hebrews just a little more than one century later. However it was at the hands of the Babylonians, not the Assyrians. Those who followed the ways of a different pantheon of gods, who were themselves to be shortly thereafter overthrown by the new and upcoming cult taught by the impious false priest known as Zoraster. Who was the major influence of the Persian dynasty that followed. The Persian King allied himself with the exiled Hebrew Nobles, and became the patron of a priest named Ezra, who redacted the various rival texts of the Jews into what we now know as the Pentateuch, or Book of Moses. Not one page of which was penned by Moses himself of course. The Israelis, whose elite were transported to the Court of King Nebukanezer, were destitute and demoralized, having suffered the worst of all humiliations with the loss of their independence and total subjugation to a foreign peoples. The breaking of the Covenant between David and Lucifer meant that their royal line was itself broken, and the sons of Solomon were scattered like chaff in the wind. This led to the formation of two opposing rival camps, one adopting the cry of 'Mea Culpa' and blaming their supposed sins for the loss of favor of their God, by which they meant the 'sin' of not killing everyone else who did not agree with their conception of Universal Order...and the other group, sulking in despair and seeking vindication through any means imaginable, which naturally left an opening for finding an alternative to Yahweh...which is how they became allied with Ariman. One group followed the banner of a scribe named Ezra, who redacted their 'holy books' into a new Covenant meant to lead the Hebrew peoples back towards the path of so-called righteousness by deliberate exclusion of their race from that of all others. And the counter-movement of the false Yahweh, which took root in certain remote sections of the Palestine deserts and wouldst eventually blossom forth like an evil weed determined to open the way for the reign of puritanical evil. By this time in events---Lucifer was slowly losing his edge and his ability to influence events was so tenuous at best that matters began to slip entirely out of his fingers. A new class of Israeli Priests arose who were more concerned about the rule of the new Law and its implementation than they were with questions of power politics, and gradually the world-conquering ambitions of Yahweh began to give ground to secular pragmatism, truly a most amazing process. Whereas before the early Israeli movement was a thinly disguised scheme to justify the confiscation of lands belonging to their rivals under the claims of Divine Sanction, the very words once written to give sanctification to this thievery were turned against their intended authors, and a new generation of Hebrew grew up seeking to find a way of reconciling the high-minded moralism of their texts with the quite evidently bestial behavior of their forebears, and through this made synthesis of the law, converting the Torah into the Talmud, which be largely a set of religious arguments debating philosophical points and establishing an ethical basis for behavior that was quite unique to the period...indeed, a novelty for the entire region, almost unprecedented in history, and all employing the name of Yahweh in ways that the real Yahweh had never imagined, let alone intended. Of course this created an entirely new schism with the ethical Priests on the one hand and the Temple authorities on the other. The one group---the Pharasees, or Students of the Law---sought a rule by ethical means and consistently applied standards while the Temple-based Saduccees---those entrenched within the hard pragmatism of state politics---sought to bend the rules to fit their own secular standards. Mid-way into this early formation a fellow named Alexander of Macedon happened along and weighed in favor of an entirely different synthesis, one that applied the Greek model of Pythagorean philosophy to the discussions of metaphysics, and under the reign of the Salucid dynasty that rose to prominence upon Alexander's untimely death a Greek-speaking administration came to power, cosmopolitan in their outlook and entirely forward-thinking in their application of scholarship to spiritual ideals. There was a lot of politics and quite a bit of corruption in the process as well, but still for the time it was the nearest thing Jerusalem had come towards a legitimately Golden Era. How sad that it could not last very long, but the forces of Entropy are never very far from seeking to crush a bastion of order in a sea of sandy chaos. The Macabees, a clan of hill-chiefs and desert nomad bandits who hated civilization and regarded the foreign influence of the Greeks as nothing less than Satanic. They called themselves the Children of Yahweh, but in actuality there were in league with the Old Ones. The headman of the Macabee Clan was a fellow named Yehud, who made contact in meditative visions with a demonic force that posed itself as Yahweh, and through him began to spread his influence throughout the mountainous territories on the outskirts of Jerusalem proper. Yehud's five sons became the chieftains who carried out his will as he organized resistance to the new Temple-run order, seizing upon its obvious foreign status to deny it legitimacy and thus claim to the common people that the priests of the capitol city were anti-Yahweh and thus had to be overthrown for the good of the entire nation. When word of this reached the ears of the capitol of course his brand of fiery apocalyptic Judaism was declared outlaw and was forbidden to be practiced. This was all that Yehud needed to set a torch to the bonfire that ensued as he raised an army--led by his most loyal and capable son---Yudah Macabeeas---and they went on a 'Holy' rampage laying siege to the lightly defended capitol, killing all of its inhabitants and putting much of the town to the torch, saving only the Palace. The Greek practice was to seek assimilation through accommodation with client states under the aegis of their empire. It was their custom to seek similarity in different religions and to forge ties with rival beliefs by finding and blending gods and precepts together into a more homogeneous package. What the Greeks had done with the Temple was to identify the Hebrew Yahweh with their own supreme God, Zeus. Thus was Zeus Yahweh adopted formally as the God of the Temple...a thing the Maccabees proclaimed to be blasphemy, and by this means justified their homicidal rampages, demanding to wipe the stain of 'uncleanliness' with the blood of those who committed this fouls sacrilege. Of course the thing that they meant to institute in its place within the temple was by far the more unclean and inherently corrupted. Funny thing about the Macabees...or the Hasmodian Dynasty as we also called Them. They could seem like the nicest, most sincere and well-meaning people if you happened to be of the same religious orientation...but the minute you cross them you get to see the other side of their face. The Maccabees ruled with a brutal efficiency not seen until the time of the Taliban in the hilly wastes of the Afghans. They proclaimed 'Unclean' anything that opposed their rule and forced the common people into abject misery. Ironically enough their alliance to the Dark forces of Oblivion undermined their pretense at sanctimonious piety, and so great became the injustice of their rule, so much did the common Hebrew people suffered beneath their yoke, that before too long the peasants began crying in an appeal for mercy at the hand of the Romans of all people. The backlash against Hasmodian rule that occurred under the banner of the Pharisees, who led the opposition against what they rightly saw was a false interpretation of Yahweh. They were lead by a fellow known to history merely as 'The Teacher of Righteousness,' but whose name---curiously enough---was Yesus of Benjamin, a forerunner for whom Anri was named and who later became identified with him. He founded a number of religious schools and communities that survived into Jesuss day, and laid the groundwork for a revival of the long-buried Masonic practices that the Hebrew had acquired through close contact with the priests of Egypt. From those roots sprang up the way of the Kabala, a Hebrew interpretation of Western Occultism, which they wedded to the new ethical system that the Pharisees had helped to invent. The Essenes were the primary teachers of this new form of Gnostic learning that emphasized the view of Man's integration with the Cosmos, and the establishment of a Path to Knowledge that could be used to combat the evil of the perverted cult of Yahweh. Though nominally under the same Codex of the Talmud, this Gnosticism took the best aspects of Persian Dualism and Greek Epistemology to form a revolutionary counter-balance to the merely mystical mumbo-jumbo and rote ritual methods then in practice with the Temple priesthood. With their assistance, in alliance with Rome, the Pharisees were able to purge away the dark shadow of Ariman and briefly free the Hebrew people from paying fealty to the monster. It was the most revolutionary stage of ritual magic set in place since the time of Thoth. Second only to Yogi philosophy in its devotion to a deeper universal understanding. No sooner did Pompei destroy much of the cult of Yahweh then its minions slowly crept back into favor during the time of Augustus. The first thing that the cunning Sicari who served this evil did was to poison the mind of King Herod the Iduminian, whom they saw as a foreign tyrant not born of the ancient blood of Solomon, and thus unworthy to sit upon the throne of David. They drove him mad and caused him to engage in a series of fratricidal purges in which even his sons were not spared of his rages. A great man fallen to greater evil, and only by some twist of the fates did one of his grandsons live to inherit a portion of his Kingdom...the Herod of Jesus’ time, who was not really all that bad a sort when contrasted to many of his peers, including Governor Pilate, who ordered Jesus’ execution. So Yahweh’s followers got back into power and attempted to run things their way, though under cover of a more banal form of evil. The Yahwists were nothing less than obsessive-compulsive in their manic devotion to cleanliness and purity, but their idea of purity was the shedding of blood to atone for alleged Sins committed by all mortals. It was Animal sacrifice on the surface of it all...but human blood was shed in darker quarters, many buckets of it devoted to their God so that the temple itself reeked of death, decay and corruption. Yesus tried to instill in people an understanding that the Temple was not the center of all creation, nor were the practices there the true representation of Judaism as it was meant to be practiced. Fortunately his brother, Yamez, was able to instill in his own followers a greater understanding of the spiritual purposes behind the teachings that Jesus helped set in motion. His followers were able to survive the destruction of Jerusalem and the forced exile of the Hebrew peoples from their homeland...and under the wise counsel of the Pharisees, who reformed Judaism into a new and more reasonable covenant that was able to survive the Diasporas, a Judaism that gave comfort to the people and helped them maintain their traditional ways through wandering and exile while they further refined and perfected the practice of the Torah and Kabalah. Lacking the concept of a Devil in their practice of strict Monotheism, the jewish people always attributed everything to God and thought it was some kind of a test he was putting them through to harden the Faith. Only a very few suspected the real truth, that the inner core of their teaching was meant to fortify them against the influence of the False Yahweh. For which crime they have been hated and persecuted down through the centuries. By the real followers of the Source of Greater Evil. Because the Kabalah represented a power that could oppose the tide of darkness, the minions of Yahweh have sought to destroy them all and erase all knowledge of the Tetragramaton from human existence. Category:Terminology